Thunder Run (Maelstrom Rising Book 6)

by Peter Nealen

  While I’d sent Greg and Chris to go retrieve more of the other teams’ drones, Jordan and I had gotten to work on the windows. We had to give up some security, but with the numbers we had, there was no getting around that. We kept our weapons close at hand, and kept one eye on the door.

  Getting a window open so we could launch a drone was not an easy task. It entailed removing the entire pane of armored glass, which took some doing. Fortunately, it appeared that the EDC had shorted the construction costs for this element, too. There were gaps behind the frame that we could get a Halligan into.

  Yes, we’d brought breaching tools, too. Like I said, the rucks were heavy, and not with water, batteries, food, and snivel gear, either.

  It still took a lot of work to pry that window loose. And I couldn’t help but think that the bad guys were going to notice. They had a lot of eyes down there, and the blinds were on the inside, so there was no way they could miss a windowpane being pulled inside.

  But it wasn’t like we had many choices if we were going to use the drones, or the WKW Tor .50 cal that we’d borrowed from the Poles.

  So, instead of pulling it all the way in, we reefed at the frame until something cracked, and the frame got loose. Dust sifted down from the gap between the frame and the wall, forming a little pile on the carpet. We were both sweating and aching. It had been a long day already, and cracking that seal had not been easy.

  “Friendlies coming in.” Greg still managed to sound cheerful somehow, despite the loads that he and Chris were carrying, not to mention how bad a day it had already been. I’d seen him choke up a few times since Scott had gone down, but Greg had a talent for putting the silver lining on everything. It was his way of coping and compartmentalizing. The man had nearly had his entire face blown off by an IED when he’d been a Ranger, and had needed extensive facial reconstruction. I’d known a lot of guys who would have descended into self-pity and depression, or worse, self-aggrandizement based on their wounded veteran status. Greg had gone another route, and while it might occasionally be somewhat aggravating to those of us of a more cynical and grumpy disposition, it kept him going, and despite some of our grumbling, sometimes it kept the rest of us going, too.

  “Bring it in.” My voice was a harsh rasp, my throat dry and raw from the exertion. Jordan had turned toward the door, his hand on his rifle, just in case, while I carefully made sure that the window was all the way loose, but that it would still stay in the frame until we needed to haul it out.

  We had the slight advantage that the sun was overhead, so there was no light reflecting off the southeast windows. We shouldn’t have been compromised by a flash of light when the angle of the windowpane changed.

  I checked my watch as the two of them struggled in, carrying rucks laden with disassembled drones and with their rifles in their hands. Neither man would have been especially ready to fight, carrying those loads, but they’d moved fast, and so far, we still hadn’t had any spontaneous uprising from within the building.

  “Start getting those put together.” I glanced at our rucks where another drone was still in pieces. We simply hadn’t had time to get the window loose and maintain security and assemble the drone.

  Then I looked at my watch. The hour that the Belgians had pledged to give us to surrender was almost up. And when I went to the window and peered out through the blinds, I saw that they probably weren’t going to give us the full hour, since we hadn’t made any move to either respond or surrender in the last forty minutes.

  A line of Griffon APCs was rolling forward, breaking through the hedges on the sides of the lawn and moving toward the entrance, their weight making their six wheels dig deep furrows in the grass. Belgian infantry advanced behind them, using the vehicles as cover.

  “Heads up.” I didn’t have to say much more. Greg kept putting the drone together, but as I pulled out the WKW, I stopped him.

  “Let Chris do that. I need air. Get comms up.”

  Greg glanced up at me, but Chris was already stepping in to finish with the drone while Jordan watched the door. We still had to guard our backs. For all we knew, the bad guys on the inside had simply been waiting for the Belgians to move.

  I got the .50 out, loaded, and ready to go, and leaned it against the wall next to the loosened window. I didn’t intend to go straight to rifles or even the drones. Not if we could get the Super Hornets off the Eisenhower, or the Vipers off the Iwo Jima.

  “Knife, this is Golf Lima Ten. We have eyes on what appears to be a company-sized element advancing on the front entrance with armored vehicles. We’re going to need some air support.”

  “Roger.” Weiss sounded a little distracted. I wondered what was going on down there. We hadn’t seen further internal resistance yet, but with the numbers involved, it was probably only a matter of time. “We don’t have good comms down here, but you should be cleared through the fire control center.”

  I didn’t reply. I caught Greg’s look as he glanced up from the radio, uncharacteristically grim.

  I knew what he was thinking. I think we all were thinking along the same lines at that point. We all remembered the nasty surprise we’d gotten in southern France a few months before, when we’d been shut out of the air support network because some officer had decided on his or her own that Triarii shouldn’t have access to US Air Force assets.

  But this was a different situation. There were Marines and SEALs on the ground with us. I hoped that was enough.

  Still, I’d had enough experience with the US military bureaucracy not to be entirely sure of that.

  I turned my eyes back to the outside as Greg started working to raise the Eisenhower’s CIC to issue the initial air support request. It sounded like he was getting through without difficulty, but the radio traffic suddenly faded into the background as I saw that the advancing armored vehicles and infantry on the ground were the least of our worries.

  Even as the armored vehicles slowed, the shooters still staying behind them for cover from the infantry sections’ machineguns, a wedge of helicopters was closing rapidly on the building, coming in from the east.

  “Knife, Golf Lima Ten, we’re going to need some more shooters up top. We’ve got airmobile forces coming in on the roof.” I was already heading for the door.

  “I’ve got four flights of Super Hornets stacked from twenty to thirty thousand,” Greg announced. “They can’t loiter for a long time—they have French Rafales and Belgian F-16s and F-35s inbound. The Marine F-35s are engaging, but they’re outnumbered. The Vipers have rearmed and are five minutes out.”

  “Bring ‘em on down.” I paused at the door, peering out into the hallway to make sure I wasn’t about to run right into a hostile that we’d understandably missed in our hasty movement through the building. “Priority targets should be the helos, if they can engage them, secondary the armored vehicles on the ground.” Our guys inside were better positioned to repel any attempt to breach the ground-level entrances than we were to hold the roof access. “Jordan, with me. Chris, cover Greg’s back.”

  Jordan and I flowed out into the hallway, splitting each direction as we went through the door. Four GROM shooters were already ahead of us, and for a second, muzzles were turned toward unfamiliar men carrying weapons. Fortunately, our calls of, “Friendly!” were almost immediately echoed, in Polish.

  “Przyjazny!”

  Two of the Poles were carrying Piorun SAMs. They knew the helos were coming, too, and Gomułka must have sent them to keep the incoming reinforcements from reaching their LZ.

  “Golf Lima Ten, this is Knife. I’m turning over some of the detainee security to your infantry teams and heading up. Got two fireteams of Variable coming, too.” Variable was the overall SEAL callsign.

  “Roger. We’ve got some of the Brotherhood with us, as well.” The Polish GROM callsign was not what any of us—even those of us who were getting more fluent—would consider pronounceable over the radio, so we’d started calling the GROM operators “The Brotherhood.”
It worked.

  I switched to our intrateam channel. “Chatty, Deacon. Need at least two shooters to cover the north roof access. Knife should have more on the way, but we’ve got airmobiles incoming.”

  “Copy. Already on the way, and we’ve got four of the Brotherhood with us.” That probably meant that they’d had to abandon their OP position. Tony knew better than to leave an operator by himself under these conditions.

  This op might well fall apart long before the MEU could get to us. Especially since they were already behind schedule.

  Together, Jordan and I trailed the GROM operators down the hallway toward the stairwell, careful to check our six every few dozen feet. Even with the GROM guys along, it still feels awfully lonely to have just six of you in an entire building full of people who might or might not want to kill you. But we got to the stairwell without incident, though we saw that we were being watched through the narrow windows in the office doors, more than once by people talking on cell phones.

  It would have been nice if we’d managed to take down the local cell network, but even with the Growlers working overtime, that had been a bridge too far.

  We could already hear the throb of the incoming helicopters as we got near the corner and the stairwell beyond it. I was scanning the hallway as we slowed, thinking fast. There wasn’t a lot of cover to be had. The doors to the offices and other rooms weren’t recessed, and even if they had been, the interior walls didn’t appear to be solid enough to stop bullets.

  I pointed to two rooms on either side of the hallway, just outside the stairwell. “We’ll clear those two, then set up to cover the door to the stairwell.” It wasn’t perfect—especially not if they bypassed us and headed straight down for the Council chambers the way we had—but it was better than nothing.

  The next few seconds threw my entire plan in the crapper.

  First, the GROM operators stormed the stairs, two of them already priming the Piorun SAMs as they went. With a curse, I led the way to cover them.

  I reached the door as the two SAM operators reached the roof, shouldering their MANPADS and searching for the incoming helicopters.

  The drone operators must have been waiting for that.

  The two Polish operators didn’t make it three steps from the hatch before a drone came down with a harsh buzz, followed a split second later by the bang of its detonation. One of the GROM operators fell backward, tumbling down the steps, tangled with the mangled remains of the launcher. Blood flowed from the hamburger that had been his face and throat, and from a dozen other wounds around his plate carrier. He was clearly dead.

  His buddy didn’t appear again, but there was no Piorun launch as the helos came closer. One of the two surviving shooters, who had nearly had his friend fall on his head, was swearing viciously in Polish, crouched below the hatch with his HK 416 leveled up at the hatch.

  I moved up as Jordan covered down the stairs, and tugged on the lead GROM operator’s sleeve. He was greyhound-lean, hatchet-faced, with a prominent nose and receding chin. He didn’t seem to notice his friend’s blood that had soaked one sleeve.

  “We need to fall back and cover the stairwell. We can’t stop them on the roof with those drones up there.”

  He looked down at me for a second, and I wondered just how much English he understood. But he nodded, tight-lipped, looking back up through the hatch over his rifle. “Let’s go.” His English was accented but clear enough.

  The walls were vibrating as the helos came in, flaring to land. We were out of time. Then everybody’s plan went to hell.

  The roar of jet engines overhead was muted by distance and the concrete above our heads, but I could still hear it. The building shuddered and reverberated with explosions as the danger-close airstrikes hammered at the lawn out front.

  Then something hit the building itself.

  The impact shook the floor under our feet, hard enough to almost make me stagger. Jordan was still looking down toward the next landing as the Council building shuddered as if part of a mountain had just fallen on it. “Oh, fuck. That ain’t good.”

  “Let’s go.” I led the way out into the hallway, rapidly closing on the first door. I still slowed and held at the door for a second, keying my radio.

  “Strawberry, Deacon.”

  “Deacon, Strawberry. A lot of things just happened at once. The first strike hit long, but the ground forces have halted for the moment. I don’t think that’s going to last, but our air cover just gave them a new problem. That impact you felt was a helo getting hit and slamming into the side of the building.”

  “Roger. Stand by.” I knew that we couldn’t afford to stay here in the hallway yakking while more airmobile troops came in over our heads. I reached for the door handle, turned it, and flung the door open, my rifle dropping level as I went through and hooked to my left to clear the corner. Jordan was almost touching my back as we cleared the threshold, and he rode the door to the stops as he cleared the opposite corner.

  The room was as empty as our OP had been. We quickly consolidated back on the door. The two surviving GROM shooters had already cleared the opposite room. “Strawberry, Deacon. Status on the rest of the birds?”

  “Hard to tell. They appear to have pulled off and circled around while more fast movers have come in to try to cover, but they’re not coming in to land yet—oh, shit!”

  I couldn’t tell what had prompted that little exclamation, but a moment later I could hear it, a dull boom somewhere in the distance.

  “I don’t know if that was one of ours or one of theirs, but a fast mover just went down on the edge of the city.” Greg still sounded a little high-strung, but he was calming down, probably regretting the profanity over the net. “Things are getting sporty out there.”

  Across the hall, the hatchet-faced GROM operator called out from the door. “We could use some help here.” Jordan barricaded on the door while I crossed to join the Poles.

  This room wasn’t just being used for storage. It wasn’t a fancy office, and I expected that the frightened, pasty young people cowering behind their desks as the other GROM guy and I swept them with eyes and muzzles, looking for weapons, probably were the absolute lowest on the EDC totem pole—at least at headquarters—but they still presented a problem.

  “Down on the floor, hands behind your heads, fingers interlaced!” We really didn’t have time for this, despite the fact that some flyboy with an itchy trigger finger and some good aim with his cannon had bought us a few precious minutes. But we couldn’t leave them loose behind us, either.

  It took far too long to zip-tie each of them. By the time I’d gotten to the last one, while Jordan and the hatchet-faced GROM shooter held on the doors and the stairwell beyond it, my earpiece crackled. “Golf Lima Ten, Knife Five.” That would be Gunny Ortiz. “What’s your location?”

  I looked up at Jordan, who checked the plaque next to the door. “Two eight three seven five.”

  I sent the room number to Ortiz. In the silence that followed, I could almost hear the Marine cussing as he tried to figure out the numbering order.

  “Roger. I’ve got two teams en route to you. The other team is holding at the north roof access.” He sounded a little winded; I wondered if they’d run up all twenty-eight floors. Knowing Marines, it was possible.

  “Copy. It sounds like we’ve got a few minutes’ grace period; one of the fast movers shot down a helo, so they’re being a little more careful coming in. But they’ll come as soon as they can beat back the fixed wing assets, and they’ve got more ground-based fighters than we do naval air.”

  “Roger that.”

  Jordan glanced over his shoulder as Ortiz’s voice came over the radio. “They’re here.” I hustled back to the door.

  Ortiz was in the lead—probably to his team leaders’ chagrin. “What have we got?”

  I pointed across the hall, where Jordan was still aimed in at the roof access stairwell. “Cleared that office—it’s just being used as storage. Got some detainee
s here. Good fields of fire on the stairs leading to the roof from these two doorways. I’d suggest that we prop that door open and cover it from back here.”

  Ortiz frowned. He was a touch shorter than me, and wearing a lot more gear. “We can cover the roof access itself from inside the stairwell.”

  Jordan beat me to it. “And what’s going to keep them from tossing frags down as soon as they figure out that you’ve got people on the stairs?” He jerked a thumb toward the main entrance below us. “They don’t want to open up with all the heavy weapons they’ve got because they’re afraid of killing hostages. But frags in the stairwell is a whole different beast. It’s a whole lot more contained. Especially if they’re in a hurry and just watched a platoon go down in flames.”

  “Trust me, Gunny, standoff is a good idea under these circumstances.” I didn’t explain how I knew, but defending a building against some corrupt politico’s high-speed personal security in Baltimore had lent us some experience and perspective that Gunny Ortiz probably didn’t have.

  The GROM guys were quiet.

  Of course, we still didn’t really have a good way to block off the stairs except by fire. Which was what it was going to have to be. Not genteel warfare, but this hadn’t been a genteel war so far.

  I had memories of blasted, burned FOBs full of dead Americans to prove that.

  The Marines split between the two rooms as I joined Jordan in the storage room, with several more heading back to the last intersecting hallway. A quick consultation and we had deconflicted that the men in the rear would stay high, while the guys on the doorways would get down to a low knee or prone, to avoid blue-on-blue. The GROM guys followed along easily enough. Apparently, the language barrier wasn’t quite as severe as we’d feared.

  Right then, there were no Triarii, Marines, or GROM. There were only our guys and their guys.

  The rules of engagement were simple. If any armed men appeared in that doorway on the stairs, they died.